The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for the processing of e-mail, and specifically to systems and methods for the autonomic handling of e-mails addressed to multiple recipients which require some type of a response, such as the provision of information or the accomplishment of a task, with a view toward minimizing the overall burden to the group of recipients in responding to or trying to track such emails.
E-mail has become an increasingly important means of communicating with others as well as an important business tool that is used for many different purposes. But the volume of e-mail is constantly increasing with a concomitant increase in the amount of time that the e-mail recipients must spend in reading and responding to the e-mail. Within larger organizations, the total amount of time spent by the workers reading e-mails, including e-mails that do not even require a response, is considerable. On occasion, time is also spent trying to track a series of related emails, particularly when they are not all linked in chain fashion. For example, some may have come from different individuals who may be responded to a request with a new e-mail, rather than a simple reply, so there is not necessarily an automatic link back to the original e-mail.
A particularly useful feature of e-mail is the ability to send the same e-mail to multiple e-mail addresses, such as a distribution list or other group, at the same time. Frequently, the purpose of sending an e-mail message to group is to request that one of the recipients of the e-mail provide information to the sender of the e-mail or perform a task that the sender of the e-mail requested. Such an e-mail can be said to contain a “to-do” item. In a typical to-do e-mail sent to a group, one or more of, but not all of, the recipients of the e-mail are typically expected to provide information or to accomplish a task that was requested in the e-mail. E-mail requests frequently are deliberately sent to multiple recipients in this manner because the sender needs a quick response, or is unsure of who in the group has the specific knowledge required to answer the inquiry, or who has time to perform the task.
One benefit of sending an e-mail with a to-do item to multiple recipients is that the sender generally receives a faster response than if the sender had only sent the e-mail to one recipient. This is because the first recipient that is available to handle the to-do item will generally respond to it. If such an e-mail request were to be sent to only one person, that person may not be able to respond, perhaps because of being too busy or being out of the office or away from his or her computer. In such cases, the originator of the e-mail would receive a slower response to the originator's request than if the to-do e-mail had been sent to a recipient who was able to respond without a significant delay. Often, the sender may receive the desired response before other recipients in the group have even opened and/or read the e-mail. Or the sender may promptly receive some further information that renders unnecessary the pursuit of the requested information.
In such cases, we have recognized that it would be useful to have a streamlined method or technique of notifying the other recipients in the group that the requested information has been provided, that the requested task has been performed or that the requested information or task is no longer needed. One goal of the present invention is to eliminate the time that the other recipients would have to spend in reading such an e-mail, or in trying to provide the requested information or perform the requested task when it had already been completed by another.
Existing e-mail systems, to our knowledge, do not provide any type of mechanism for automatically indicating to a group of other recipients of the “to-do” e-mail that a recipient of the e-mail had responded to it or that another recipient had provided the requested information or performed the requested task. Currently, a recipient who resolves the to-do e-mail can notify the other recipients of the to-do e-mail by forwarding yet another e-mail to everyone on the distribution list to inform them that the to-do item in the e-mail had been performed. Alternatively, the sender can send out another email saying in effect that “I have received the requested information” or “the requested task has been handled” or “the requested no longer needs to be done.” In a conventional e-mail system, either of the foregoing procedures would create yet another message in the in-box for each user on the distribution list. This in turn takes up more time since the recipients have to read it too. Moreover, if in the meantime other e-mails had come into the mailboxes of that recipient or other recipients, there is a good chance that the original to-do e-mail and the follow-up message from the first recipient to respond saying, “I have handled the to-do item,” or from the sender saying “I received my answer” or “the task has been completed” would be separated by one or more intervening e-mails in the in-boxes of the various recipients. This in turn only adds to the burden of the sender or the recipients in trying to match up disparate e-mails that are coming in to determine if the task has been completed.
Lastly, a number of modern e-mail systems have so-called “advanced sorting” features or “rules wizards” for automatically directing incoming e-mails to certain predefined folders and even can optionally mark the incoming e-mails as having been read or can flag up them for follow-up. Yet, they do not, to our knowledge, permit the sender or other recipients of the same message to have, at a later time, these already-sent e-mails in a recipient's main in-box or in certain designated folders automatically marked for a different disposition, such as directing them to a different folder.